Monthly Archives: January 2017

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

The Undemocratic United States

From Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs from 1997,  The Rise of Illiberal Democracy: (this may require registration to read the whole article which I encourage. ) It is odd that the United States is so often the advocate of elections

Read More

A Perverted Government

from The Worst Perversion, by Kevin Williamson at National Review: Not only was the Obama administration marked by scandal of the most serious sort — perverting the machinery of the state for political ends — it was on that front,

Read More

The Problem with the Benevolent Dictator

From Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs from 1997,  The Rise of Illiberal Democracy: (this may require registration to read the whole article which I encourage. ) Finally, and perhaps more important, power accumulated to do good can be used subsequently

Read More

Provoking the Media

From The Federalist, Donald Trump Is The First President To Turn Postmodernism Against Itself  by David Ernst: Democrats gleefully welcomed Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries with the expectation that they’d bury him in a pile of condescension for being a

Read More

Trump Steals The Union Vote

From Peggy Noonan at The Wall Street Journal, Trump Tries to Build a ‘Different Party’: The lengthy, public and early meeting with the union leaders was, among other things, first-class, primo political pocket-picking. The Trump White House was showing the Democratic

Read More

Slower Growth with Less Equality

From the Wall Street Journal Editorials,  About That Obama Boom: Speaking of weak, growth for all of 2016 clocked in at 1.6%, the slowest since 2011 and down from 2.6% in 2015. That marks the 11th consecutive year that GDP

Read More

The Language of the Deplorables

from The City Journal, Trump and the American Divide by Victor Davis Hanson: Language is also different in the countryside. Rural speech serves, by its very brevity and directness, as an enhancement to action. Verbosity and rhetoric, associated with urbanites, were always

Read More

Bureaucratic Behaviour

from newly discovered blog Isegoria, Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics Francis W. Porretto notes that Cyril Northcote Parkinson studied the same phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior: Parkinson promulgated a number of laws of bureaucracy that serve to explain a huge percentage

Read More

Wholes Apart

From a book review of Conserving America? by Patrick Deneen- review by Micah Medowcroft-  Trump Didn’t Kill Conservatism in The Wall Street Journal: In our republic, argues Mr. Deneen, a conception of men “not as parts of wholes, but as wholes apart” has

Read More

The Marginal Utility of Happiness

Look again at your own ancestors compared with your present condition. You are much better off, and have much more scope to pursue Bildung. Admittedly you don’t own a seventy-five-foot yacht. Too bad. Being an adult person of sense, however,

Read More

Lies that Matter

from The Wall Street Journal, Trump, The Press, and he Dictatorship of the Trolletariat: But few journalists have appreciated the degree to which Mr. Trump’s entire political and governing strategy depends on trolling them. They’ve mostly assumed his penchant for

Read More

The Impartial Judge

From Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs from 1997,  The Rise of Illiberal Democracy: (this may require registration to read the whole article which I encourage. ) Since 1945 Western governments have, for the most part, embodied both democracy and constitutional

Read More

In Search of Credible Critics

from David French at National Review, Don’t Shred Your Credibility for Your Tribe The larger truth, however, is that those with no credibility make poor critics. Given the recent past, media outrage at Spicer’s press conference starts to seem less

Read More

Gaslighting the Press

from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, So things will change. The press’s “insider” status — which it cherishes — is going to fade. (This is producing waves of status anxiety, as are many other Trump-induced institutional changes). And, having abandoned, quite openly, any pretense of objectivity

Read More

Muscular Votes

from The City Journal, Trump and the American Divide by Victor Davis Hanson: Yet if muscular work has seen a decline in its relative monetary worth, it has not necessarily lost its importance. After all, the elite in Washington and Menlo Park

Read More

Five Things I Like About Trump (and Five Things I Don’t)

Five things I like about Trump He will hold media accountable.  For too long they have been able to mislead intentionally with no pushback. He comprehends that the inequality in power is a greater problem than the inequality in wealth.

Read More

Campaign in Poetry, Govern in Prose

from Jonah Goldberg at National Review, The Unwisdom of Crowds: I guess my point is that I don’t like crowds. I don’t trust them. Good things rarely come from them. Not all crowds are mobs, but all mobs start as

Read More

Confusing Political Means with Noble Ends

from National Review, George Will on the inauguration, A Most Dreadful Inaugural Address Looking out toward where the fields of the republic roll on, Trump, a Gatsby for our time, said: “What truly matters is not which party controls our government

Read More

Breaking the New Deal Bond with the Heartland

from The City Journal, Trump and the American Divide by Victor Davis Hanson: As the nation became more urban and its wealth soared, the old Democratic commitment from the Roosevelt era to much of rural America—construction of water projects, rail, highways, land

Read More

Theoretical Peace

from The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens writes On Palestinian Statehood But isn’t a Palestinian state a necessity for Israel? Can it maintain its Jewish and democratic character without separating itself from the millions of Palestinians living west of the Jordan

Read More